Waggle and the Future of Edge Computing and Smart Cities

Tuesday, July 1111:35am

Sensors and embedded computing devices are being woven into buildings, roads, household appliances, and light bulbs. Most are as simple as possible, with low-power microprocessors that just push sensor values up to the cloud. However, another class of powerful, programmable sensor node is emerging. The Waggle (www.wa8.gl) platform supports parallel computing, machine learning, and computer vision for advanced intelligent sensing applications. Waggle is an open source and open hardware project at Argonne National Laboratory that has developed a novel wireless sensor system to enable a new breed of smart city research and sensor-driven environmental science. Leveraging machine learning tools such as Google’s TensorFlow and Berkeley’s Caffe and computer vision packages such as OpenCV, Waggle sensors can understand their surroundings while also measuring air quality and environmental conditions. Waggle is the core technology for the Chicago ArrayOfThings (AoT) project (https://arrayofthings.github.io). Join me as we explore the new world of parallel computing at the edge. The presentation will outline the current progress of designing and deploying new edge computing platforms designed for smart sensing.